Education Yinong Chen and Gennaro De Luca School of Computing, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

VIPLE: Visual IoT/Robotics Programming Language Environment for Computer Science Education

Yinong Chen and Gennaro De Luca

School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-8809, U.S.A.

Overview

• Introduction to IoT and RaaS
• IoT Standards and Protocols
• Definition of VIPLE
• Educational examples in VIPLE
• VIPLE and IoT devices

History of IoT

• Internet of Things
• RFID tags and Electronic Product Code (Auto-ID Lab)
• IoIT = IoT + computing power
• 15 billion IoT devices
• 5 billion IoIT devices
• 1 billion intelligent systems

Internet-based Computing

• Cloud computing

– Desktop-based => Internet-based – Physical products => “Things” or services

• Cyber Physical Systems (CPS)

– Extended/decentralized version of embedded systems

• Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS)

– Loosely coupled/content-oriented systems – Industrial production lines, railway signaling, robotics

Robot as a Service

• Composed of services, a service directory, and service

clients

• IoIT (and IoT) device
• IoT-enabled hardware:

– Intel Galileo/Edison

• CPS
• ADS

IoT Standards

• Supports many protocols/standards
• Connection to physical world

– Also supports various standards – ADS uses a content-oriented protocol

• DPWS
• RaaS

IoT Web Data Representations: HTML, JSON, OWL, RDF, XML, etc. Service and Web-Based Computing Cloud Computing and Big Data Processing Internet Protocols, HTTP, TCP, IP Device Connection Protocols: ADS, DPWS, RaaS, Industry Control Systems, Industry Internet, etc. Technologies Applications

IoT/RaaS Programming

• Visual programming environments for education

– MIT App Inventor – Alice

• Robotics programming

– MSRDS VPL

• Used at ASU, FSE 100
• Discontinued 2014
• Lacks support for new robots

Definition of VIPLE

• Based on Microsoft VPL
• VIPLE supports similar applications
• Additional VIPLE services:

– General services (e.g. User I/O, Timers) – Vendor robot services – Generic robot services

• Educational tool

ASU VIPLE Basic Activities Microsoft VPL Basic Activities

Fundamental Programming in VIPLE

VIPLE Multithreading

• Teaching parallel computing

– Handles low-level synchronization, thread safety, data passing. – Allows building of multithreaded applications. – Race conditions may still occur.

• Hardware is fully utilized

– Students can experiment with speedups/optimizations.

Parallel Computing in VIPLE

Event-driven Programming in VIPLE

button pressed

door closing door

• pened

door closed door

• pening

button pressed limit tripped limit tripped

• pening

stopped

button pressed

closing stopped

button pressed button pressed button pressed

VIPLE’s IoT Interface Definition

• Internet Protocol

– Multiple supported standards

• Data Format

– Standardized JSON

ASU VIPLE Visual IoT Programming IoT / Robot An object pair, with the second element an array of objects

Connecting VIPLE to Devices

Drive-by-Wire

Maze Navigation with an IoT Device

DistanceMeasured < 400 Turned Right Turned Left rightFinished Resume 180 DistanceMeasured < rightDistance Turning Right Turning Left leftFinished DistanceMeasured >= rightDistance Resume180 Finished Start RightDistance  DistanceMeasured Forward

Maze Navigation Implementation

Intel Edison-based robot with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth components. A distance sensor is installed in front.

Multithreading and Maze Navigation

• Multithreading is a key part of maze navigation.

– Many algorithms require concurrent sensor data readings. – Some actions do not need to be waited on.

• Many applications are facilitated by multithreading.

– New users have more freedom and power in their application development.

Conclusion

• New Visual Programming Language: VIPLE

– Extends Microsoft VPL – Supports Lego EV3 – Supports all IoT devices based on an open architecture

• VIPLE has been pilot tested at ASU and several other

universities globally.